Andres Oppenheimer: Mexico showed the way in 2013

By Andres Oppenheimer

Thursday

Dec 26, 2013 at 12:01 AM

MIAMIOf all the things that happened in Latin America in 2013, the one that could have the most positive long-term impact — if it’s implemented properly — is a deal between Mexico’s three biggest political...

MIAMI

Of all the things that happened in Latin America in 2013, the one that could have the most positive long-term impact — if it’s implemented properly — is a deal between Mexico’s three biggest political parties to approve fundamental reforms.

Granted, the so-called Pact for Mexico has already been broken. Its leftist members abandoned it recently in disagreement with the new energy reforms, which will open parts of Mexico’s oil industry to the private sector for the first time in 70 years.

And, granted, its political, educational, labor, telecommunications, fiscal and energy reforms may be watered down when the Mexican Congress issues regulations to implement the new laws.

And it is also true that President Enrique Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has led the passage of the new reforms, deserves a medal in hypocrisy for having systematically blocked these same reforms when it was in the opposition.

But the fact remains that in 2013, Mexico was the only country in the Americas — including the United States — where the government and opposition parties broke decades of political paralysis to approve profound reforms that could speed up the country’s development.

That’s no minor achievement in a region where some presidents — Venezuela’s, for example — refer to peaceful opposition leaders as “enemies of the fatherland,” and where some legislative blocs such as Tea Party Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have at times almost brought their country to a halt by relentlessly blocking most agreements.

Consider what the Mexican deal between the ruling PRI, the center-right National Action Party and the center-left Party for the Democratic Revolution achieved in 2013, before the agreement’s de-facto dissolution:

•Education reform: Mexico’s parties passed a law in September that will break the country’s once almighty teachers unions’ control over the education system and will allow for the first time the hiring, promotion and even firing of new teachers based on standardized tests and evaluations. Until now, Mexico had thousands of teachers who couldn’t be fired even if they failed to show up in class.

•Political reform: Mexico’s Congress agreed to change electoral rules to allow future members to be re-elected and to reserve half of congressional seats for female candidates. Re-election of legislators had been a long-sought demand by citizens’ groups, which complained that, without re-election, Mexican legislators were not accountable to their constituents but rather to their parties’ bosses.

•Fiscal reform: Congress, with major backing from the left-of-center Party for the Democratic Revolution, passed a fiscal law that will raise taxes on the wealthiest and impose a new tax on soft drinks and stock-market gains.

•Labor reform: In the biggest labor-law shakeup in four decades, Congress passed a law to make it easier for employers to hire and fire workers. Its intent is to drive millions of people out of the underground economy.

•Telecommunications reform: Under the new law, two new regulating agencies will try to bring more competition in the telecommunications industry, which has been dominated by outlets owned by billionaire Carlos Slim.

•Energy reform: By far the most covered by foreign media, Mexico’s new energy reform will change the constitution to allow private firms to work with the giant state-owned Pemex oil company in the exploration and drilling of new fields. The constitutional overhaul is expected to bring billions of dollars in foreign investments over the next decade.

“Mexico has proved capable of doing the politically impossible,” Mexican Congressman David Penchyna, who heads the congressional Energy Committee, wrote in the daily newspaper Reforma recently. “We have opened a new page in history.”

It is too early to tell whether Mexico’s 2013 reforms will indeed turn the country into the new star of the emerging world. Much of it will depend on whether Pea Nieto is able to keep the new laws from being watered down by special interests in the implementation process.

But Mexico has given the Americas a lesson in civility, which many countries would do well to emulate. It seemed impossible in Mexico, and yet it happened. Happy holidays!

Andres Oppenheimer (aoppenheimer@miamiherald.com) is a Latin America correspondent for The Miami Herald.

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